Dogs vs. Cats, Ashcroft vs. Satan, & other subtle distinctions.

By Jonah Goldberg
 
Way back in Y2K I promised readers that I would run more corrections columns. I also promised myself that I would stop eating bricks of cheese like they were apples. It�s a sign of my enduring commitment to you folks that I have kept my promise to you even before I kept my promise to myself. (If you hate corrections columns please skip down to the end, because we�ve got ten � count them, ten � announcements for you.)

So without much further ado . . .

It turns out that a lot, and I mean a lot � like a crowd scene from Ben Hur � of conservatives are sick and tired of being called Nazis by know-nothing nasty liberals. "Springtime for Slanders" got a huge, huge response from good-hearted conservatives who take great offense to the notion that favoring a limited government is the same thing as favoring genocide.

But what got the most reaction from people who disagreed with the column � i.e., those who see no difference between, say, Tom DeLay and Goebbels � was my statement that: �I�ve never met a real social-welfare state leftist who could answer the following question without having to think real hard: �Aside from the murder and genocide, what exactly don�t you like about National Socialism?��

Oh, man, did these guys pound sand about that. They said that if I really thought liberals were closer to Nazis then I was the real moron. They whined and banged their high chairs, they shrieked like little girls at a zoo Spider House or Cher when she sees herself without makeup, they did just about everything you can do in an e-mail to express their outrage and incredulity, except of course answer the *&^%$ question.

Which brings us to the fascinating cultural-political fact that Leftists in fact do have more in common with Nazis than modern conservatives do. Let me be clear: I am not calling the Left a bunch of Nazis; that would be as wrong as calling the Right a bunch of Nazis. But, if you are willing to concede that a modern conservative is not inherently a racist, anti-Semitic bigot, then this is actually a pretty obvious point. I should say that if you can�t concede that a modern conservative is not an inherently bigoted person then, again, you are a very ignorant and silly person addled with a profoundly irrational view of politics.

Anyway, I really don�t want to get sophomorically tendentious here but this topic really seems to interest people. So, first of all, it should be pointed out that Nazism, a.k.a. National Socialism, was, well, socialist. And you know, socialists believe in certain things that my intellectual confreres do not but that Harvard Yard and Jesse Jackson types do believe. That�s why John Maynard Keynes � the still-reigning God of liberal economics � had nice things to say about Nazi fiscal policy. That�s why the sainted Friedrich Hayek feared in The Road to Serfdom that British and American economic planning would lead to Fascism or Communism � a distinction he and most libertarians find to be almost meaningless.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the founder of the NAACP, traveled to Germany in 1936 and found much to admire about the dictatorship, which he called �absolutely necessary to put the state in order.� According to Du Bois�s esteemed biographer, David Levering Lewis, Du Bois �found National Socialism to be neither �wholly illogical,� nor hypocritical, but to be still �a growing and developing body of thought� in which he divined an �extraordinary straddle� between capitalism and communism....� He was there on a grant to study �the way in which popular education for youth and adults in Germany has been made to minister to industrial organization and advance; and how this German experience can be applied so as to help in the reorganization of the American Negro industrial school, and the establishment of other social institutions.�

In other words, from a liberal�s perspective the Nazis really seemed to be on to something in the 1930s. The same year Du Bois went to Germany, nearly a majority of Americans told Gallup pollsters that they thought the New Deal could turn into a dictatorship. Indeed, FDR called Mussolini an �admirable Italian gentleman,� and in the 1930s Mussolini had great things to say about FDR�s program.

There are many conservatives of a certain flavor who to this day see a great deal of Fascism in the New Deal. Indeed, at the time there were liberals who saw it too. William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, declared that FDR�s Civilian Conservation Corps �smacks of Fascism, of Hitlerism, of a form of Sovietism.� When FDR�s New Deal centralization started to get out of hand, the Supreme Court let it be known that he�d better cut it out. To which FDR responded with his court-packing scheme, which seemed to some an anti-democratic effort.

The similarities continue. Hitler and the Nazis were resolutely pro-gun- control, pro-speech-code and anti-religious. They regulated everything and dumped billions into public-works projects. Further, the intellectual cross-pollination between German eugenicists and the founding mothers of modern feminism is remarkable.

Recall that Margaret Sanger, the still-revered founder of Planned Parenthood, was an undiluted eugenicist committed to, in her words, the elimination of �weeds . . . overrunning the human garden� and the segregation of �morons, misfits, and the maladjusted." Her journal, The Birth Control Review, was a convenient transmission belt for racist bile. Lothrop Stoddard, who also was on Sanger�s Board of Directors, wrote in �The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy� that �we must resolutely oppose both Asiatic permeation of white race-areas and Asiatic inundation of those non-white, but equally non-Asiatic regions inhabited by the really inferior races.�

Of course, much of this is more than a little unfair. FDR may have put some Japanese people in camps, but he was by no means a Fascist (though he was much closer to one than was my hero Calvin Coolidge, who didn�t think government should do much of anything at all). In fact, FDR was a great American, though perhaps an overrated president. W.E.B. Du Bois denounced the anti-Semitism of the Nazis and later the Holocaust with great alacrity and sincerity. Keynes was by all measures honorable, if a bit confused about the merits of social spending. Margaret Sanger, on the other hand, would probably be quite comfortable exchanging recipes with Eva Braun in the bunker.

Nonetheless, the embarrassing fact for the Left is that if you subtract the peculiar bigotries of Nazism (Communism had its own bigotries) you are left with a fairly conventional centralized socialistic approach to governing. This is just one of the reasons Stalin insisted that all Soviet and Comintern propaganda only use phrases like �Anti-Fascist League� of this or the �Anti-Fascist Society� of that.

Modern conservatives have no trouble seeing that Nazism was evil incarnate, but for generations Leftists had trouble seeing that Stalin belongs in the adjacent cubicle in Hell. One of the reasons for this is that conservatism holds that all totalitarianism grows from the same poisoned fruit, while the Left must make incredibly esoteric distinctions based upon the motives of the social planners doing the killing. If you are on the road to an egalitarian paradise it�s okay to break a few eggs (don�t even bother, this metaphor cannot be saved). But if the motives of the centralized experts differ from Leftist dogma, well, it�s evil Fascism.

How else to explain three decades of Castroite sycophancy among American journalists and editorialists? Cuba has free health care! Free education! Free housing! The only thing not free in Cuba are the people, an objection to which armies of sophisticated liberal civil libertarians in America can barely stifle a yawn.

Well, I doubt that Cuba�s free goodies, especially health care, could possible compare to what the State provided in Hitler�s Germany, and yet if someone says, �Well, you know, Hitler did some good things for the German people, like build the autobahn� you are immediately, and rightly, called an apologist for Nazism.

All right, enough of all that. If I continue any further I will start quoting Hayek, and that always gets me in trouble with someone.